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Comment by vhiremath4 | Hacker News Reader

This is quite sad. Even if students would cheat off each other, someone had to do the homework. And even the collaboration of cheating on homework always served as a forcing function for me or others to think about the material. If not actively, at least in the form of a quasi background radiation. With AI that is completely gone, and without reward loops for incremental work, the truth is there is a large number of people (especially 18-20 year olds) who will not do well on the exams because they need a bit of a stick.

I am not saying this as a black and white statement. I just think there are different cohorts of students based on maturity and self motivation and we might be losing out on one cohort that is at neither extreme.

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Students who need that kind of "stick" to do well on exams aren't college material in the first place. We have pushed far too many youths into college as the default option, and that hasn't been good for the students or the institutions.

There are plenty of people who have the innate intelligence and intellectual curiosity to succeed in college, but come out of high school lacking discipline and clueless about what they want to study. They would be better off spending a few years working or serving in the military or something to get their shit together first, and then enroll in college later. Those students tend to have clearer goals and take the educational experience more seriously.

ah yes, instead of giving students homework, have them serve in the military for a few years until they’re ready for college

Sure, why not? That's not the best option for everyone but worked out well for several people I know.

It didn't work so well for elementary school students in Iran.

Oh come on, how is that related at all?

You don't think overfunding a gigantic army has any connection with said army committing war crimes all over the world?

Interesting username considering Worf served in the two largest armies of Humans and Klingons. Not all large armies are meant for destroying everything in the world.

nothing like some killing to get you settled down.

> Students who need that kind of "stick" to do well on exams aren't college material in the first place

Well, that raises an interesting philosophical question. What sorts of learning patterns in a person make them "college material"?

Surely you agree that there are a wide variety of teaching styles present among all college professors. If a student's personal way of learning best is incompatible with their assigned professor, are they not college material? Why is this an issue with the student, and not the professor not being teaching material, or the university not being facilitator-of-education material for failing to match students and professors well?

I agree that people have been pushed into college as a default option due to it being overloaded as both place of learning but also printing salary-granting papers, but it's NOT clear to me that students who need the specific stick mentioned in some cases are broadly unsuited for higher learning.

It's not about "teaching style". It's about having intrinsic motivation vs having to be motivated with a stick and threat of failure.

It's about having to be externally motivated for that particular assignment. Or class of assignment, whatever.

There are often a variety of tasks which are graded. Homework, exams, presentations, labs, etc. Every class and professor sets the mix of valuation of these differently, and has different quantities of each. That's teaching style.

If you hate presentations and cannot be roused to make one except by threat of failure, but are great at learning the material and pass the exams with ease, then that's a teaching style incompatibility.

> What sorts of learning patterns in a person make them "college material"?

Any that are self motivated.

> If a student's personal way of learning best is incompatible with their assigned professor, are they not college material?

Honestly, no. It shows a lack of (a) institutional-navigational skills, e.g. change your professor, (b) flexibility to different learning "styles" (which are increasingly being shown to be a myth) and/or (c) ability to circumvent adversity, e.g. by reading the textbook, finding online videos or hunting down a study group. That doesn't mean they can't learn some of these skills. But if they don't have by them by the end of freshman year, college is a waste of time for them.

Modern college students are basically afforded the freedoms and privileges of a classical scholar with a wealthy patron. Their day-to-day needs are taken care of. They have access to massive libraries. They have access to lectures and professors at office hours. And they navigate all of it with a pre-selected cohort of similar students.

(To be clear, I think one can be tremendously successful and valuable without completing or even attending college. As in no ambitious path is actually closed off from you. Unless it's research.)

> That doesn't mean they can't learn some of these skills. But if they don't have by them by the end of freshman year, college is a waste of time for them.

I disagree, because muddling through one way or another grants the salary paper that makes it easier to have success in the rest of life.

> To be clear, I think one can be tremendously successful and valuable without completing or even attending college. As in no ambitious path is actually closed off from you. Unless it's research.

Again, I disagree.I mean, I agree on its face, in that a sufficiently motivated and capable person is capable of achieving success with or without a college degree.

But we're talking about people who aren't motivated and capable. The best path to something resembling success for people who lack the motivation and capability to be successful on their own, is to muddle through the university system and by whatever necessary means get the piece of paper.

College at large is not a waste of time for these people. Until the downstream society stops valuing a degree as it does, time spent getting the degree is not wasted, because it yielded the degree. If the paper is had, the time was well spent, regardless of how that time was actually spent or whether anything was learned.

> muddling through one way or another grants the salary paper that makes it easier to have success in the rest of life

True [1]. I'm not debating the individual incentives. (I wasn't clear about this earlier.) I'm just not convinced a college graduate who muddled through is worth 75% more to an employer or society than a high school grad who muddles.

> a sufficiently motivated and capable person is capable of achieving success with or without a college degree

For a binary measure of success, yes. A successful person empowered with a peaceful, rich society and challenging college experience will do better than one without.

[1] https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2025/what-happened-to...

I agree with everything you said here :)

In the real world, those on the bottom of the social hierarchy (such as undergrad students) need to adapt to the styles of those on the top (professors). Perhaps that's unfair but it's just the way the world operates. College can be a great environment to learn that essential life skill of adaptability. Find a way to succeed even when you're in a shitty environment surrounded by toxic people.

If we're talking about "the way the world operates", then because of how society values college degrees, any path that gets you the piece of paper is a worthwhile and valuable one. Whether that path involves learning, complaining until given a passing grade, or forcing/convincing your professors to accommodate your preferred style of "learning".

This is something that needs to be fixed downstream, by making the paper less valuable. Making the paper more difficult to get instead is just manufacturing misery because of people too stubborn to pull their heads out of the sand and admit that the function of undergrad is the salary paper, and self-motivated learning has been largely relegated to grad school.

It depends on what college is really for.

Much of college is a social signaling mechanism. Well over a decade ago one of my family members, with a degree of shame had to explain to a friend why I didn’t finish my BA.

A lot of middle and upper class people use college as a way to filter people. You can argue our top universities also serve as finishing schools.

I did, after reaching six figures anyway, finish my BA. The shame is gone.

Or does it still linger as I went to a middle of the road state school. Not Stanford, Yale or even Berkeley.

Honestly I originally attended community college in part to get grant money/loans which allowed me to get a cheap apartment. As a bonus I meet a lot of cool people, read Howard Zinn.

Sure, there are fundamental questions about what college should really be for. Should the focus be on training competent employees or educating well-rounded citizens or anointing social elites or eliminating injustice or advancing the frontiers of human knowledge? Everyone seems to be coming to the debate with different unstated assumptions about that.

You guys are acting like you can only live at one of two extremes: purely self-motivated, or purely grade driven.

For most students it’s a mix of the two.

Yeah I disagree with this entirely.

I did very poorly in school growing up. I think I failed at least 4-6 classes in middle/high school.

In college I did well and I'm now getting my masters in CS while working as a software engineer.

So, the 'stick' can certainly be useful. Doing poorly in high school is not necessarily an indicator of how you will do in college -- particularly if your life at home was turbulent as it was for me.

You missed the point. Some level of "stick" is appropriate and often necessary for children in middle/high school. But this article is about adults in college. If you get to college and still need the stick then it's probably not the right place for you.

I didn't miss the point. The "stick" was essential to me in college, but I didn't express that very well in my previous comment

None of that would seem like a problem to me if the costs for going to US colleges and universities weren't so ridiculous and the penalties for student loan debt weren't so one sided.

When I was at university, a student caught cheating was cause for being expelled.

I am recruiting college kids right now, impeccable pedigrees, elite universities. Our recruitment process involves the kids recording videos where they answer questions as a pre-screening. They are explicitly told not to use AI for the exercise. I have the Claude and ChatGPT answer to those questions on my screen while I review their responses. 40% read it pretty much verbatim. The paradox is I don't even care whether they knew the answer or not, but to me it's an integrity test.

When I was young, public universities in Spain only evaluated the final exam. That was not a problem; it helped people become responsible. Nowadays, they have changed it to evaluate continuous homework, and students end up worse prepared.

Interesting. Honestly I think about this much more in a cohort way. There’s some cohort of students who are extremely self motivated and mature and understand the way you do one thing is kinda the way you do all things. There’s another cohort that is completely checked out or whose priorities are not grades at all. For these cohorts I don’t think it makes a big different.

But it’s hard for me to imagine that for the cohorts in between (who definitely want to be motivated) having some forcing function is just an easier guiding hand to helping them become responsible vs. completely bombing a class and then potentially losing hope or self identifying as lazy/helpless - which I had seen all too often to some of my smartest classmates.

Regardless not saying this to invalidate your experience. Just hasn’t lined up with mine.

Unfortunately the single final exam selects for lucky people. Did you learn the right thing? Are you healthy and well rested on the day? Can you perform under arbitrarily selected stressful conditions? Are your executive functions fine with that plan?

The responsibility part is just one element influencing the result.

>single final exam selects for lucky people. Did you learn the right thing? Are you healthy and well rested on the day?

If it's a well-designed course it should be clear what the content of the exam will be. If not, it's the professor's fault. And barring rare emergencies being rested on the day is also generally a matter of preparation, not luck.

It's clear what pool the content will be from. But it's impossible to check everything. Some people will get things they've practiced more, some the opposite. Unless you give out the full list of questions, there will be luck involved.

> barring rare emergencies

It doesn't have to be a rare emergency. Things happen, loud student parties happen, random bad nights happen.

> Some people will get things they've practiced more, some the opposite. Unless you give out the full list of questions, there will be luck involved.

In the case of calculus as an example, there should be nothing from the class you didn't have time to practice sufficiently. A full academic year is more than enough time to learn integrals, derivatives, sequences, and series with the small collection of tricks for solving difficult problems (telescoping series, trig sub, etc.) There's a couple dozen rules you learn that are straightforward to apply, and for the times they aren't obvious, there's like a dozen total tricks (trig sub, etc.).

I took these classes. I remember how most people just phoned in the entire thing and complained at the exam review sessions how hard everything was.

It's the simplest of memorization.

Your argument seems to imply that the only thing that an exam is possibly allowed to measure is ability to answer a question at some arbitrary point in time. It also separates the people with the wit to understand a bunch of topics in a span of 3 or 5 months, the ability to plan accordingly, enough self control, and some motivation to see the plan through from the ones that don't. That's not a bad thing, as diplomas are often used as a proxy not only for intelligence, but also for suitability to certain jobs.

The only thing I'm saying is that measuring once maximises the luck component. Sure, measure other things by proxy as well. But to borrow your phrase, understanding and taking into account the variability of real life behaviours, sampling noise and environment biases shows "not only intelligence, but also for suitability to certain jobs."

> maximises the luck component

No, it doesn't. Repeating it ad infinitum does that.

But therefore it's a good thing grades aren't just pass or fail, but have a range, from 1 to 10, or to 20 or whatever. Too bad there's so much external pressure on the system.

> Repeating it ad infinitum does that.

Take a moment to think about it. Why does the confidence interval go smaller with more samples? What does it say about the impact of luck in repeated tests?

In tests, reseats allow you to take the maximum, not the average. The maximum goes asymptotically up.

I liked my prof's approach to exams:

"You may bring one 8.5x11 double-sided cheat sheet into the exam. You may write anything you want on it. And I promise you that if you prepare such a sheet, you'll never even look at it during the exam."

And he was right.

I certainly find that now, going back to uni. In a couple of subjects we get the option to prepare a cheat sheet, and I would say I actually look at less than 10% of it. The act of preparing it forces me to revise, and internalise the facts and ideas.

What about frequent in-class proctored quizzes?

Only if you were planning to scrape by. If you actually know the material (the thing the exam is supposed to determine), you should do fine, and any good or bad luck will tend to average out by the time you graduate. Besides, there really aren't any alternatives left. Completed homework had some weak-ish signal for a while, but now it doesn't.

Ultimately the goal of education shouldn't just be a filter but it should ensure that as many people as possible learn the material. Homework allows for early intervention by faculty to get people back on track. There really are students who end up succeeding after this intervention.

The solution is not to feed students from spoon all the time. They are adults and should act as such, it is not a school where it is really important to give every child a chance. Grading homework must be opt-in. Those who want it, get the grade as a feedback, can seek for help then and get the help, those who skip should be assumed prepared for final exam and judged by it. There are millions of people in the world who can use education opportunities to their maximum, and the place should not be reserved to those who feel entitled by whatever privilege they have.

We observe that intervention leads to more students learning. I don't believe that "well they are adults they can fail if they want" is an excuse for a university refusing to take steps that they know would improve pedagogy.

I do agree that AI has made this basically useless. Rather than skipping homeworks or doing a bad job the students just cheat and there is no opportunity to notice and intervene. They get all the way to the screen-free final and fail.

I do not think that controlling homework does improve pedagogy at scale. Homework helps engaged and motivated students who are ready to accept the feedback. Maybe in your place they are majority and effects are visible. As soon as grades for homework become the goal, the Goodhart‘s law starts playing the role in the dynamics of relationships between students and teachers. AI has nothing to do with it, cheating with homework did always exist.

> I do not think that controlling homework does improve pedagogy at scale.

You are welcome to believe this. You are also wrong.

I am curious if you have ever taught at a university.

As someone who tasted both education models, the US model of babysitting students for the first few years after high school is superior. Students coming in with relatively weak preparation are able to catch up to their better prepared peers within a couple years. At the junior (3rd year) level you can hardly tell the difference between the graduates of elite high schools and run of the mill public schools. I think the entry bar is much higher, and in many cases insurmountable, in Europe. It persists through the years so someone perfectly capable of developing the required discipline and chops has no chance if they didn't come from the right high school or high school track.

Even ignoring learning outcomes, answer sharing was a good excuse for the nerds to talk to the not-nerds.

>Even ignoring learning outcomes, answer sharing was a good excuse for the nerds to talk to the not-nerds.

You mean to plagiarize their work. Now finally the nerds also have the option to have somebody else do their work for them.

There seems to be increasingly less of that these days

I think this is hard to understate.

I began my undergraduate in 2020, so it was mostly online and my uni group had a discord server we all used.

I already knew how to program pretty well, so there were plenty of nights where I sat in discord and helped people debug their programs. I wouldn't share answers directly as the professors checked for identical and identical-with-renamed-identifiers. So the incentives were pretty well aligned for a collaboration where the students did learn something themselves.

I was incentivized to teach them stuff instead of just fixing their problems, and they were incentivized to learn too (so as not to be stuck dependent on me and my time), and for the most part they did.

It was also a very easy way for me as a not-very-social-teen to get integrated and accepted into the group. Not in a transactional way: "I helped you so you owe me". But rather in the sense that they had to give me a chance and they spent time with me in an environment where I was comfortable, which made it more natural for them to invite me to social situations where it would have been more difficult for me to go directly without knowing the people in advance.

And just like people came to me for programming advice, we went to another guy who really knew Math and Physics for those subjects, and so on.

That is all gone now. What a shame.

Back when I was a student, 25+ years ago, many professors were a bit lazy. They just re-used problem sets which they had made earlier. No single year would be alike, but the problem sets would still be from a larger collection.

The students would then hand down the big book of problem and solution sets down to the freshman class.

The professors, still being a bit lazy, knew this. But instead of scarping the old problems, they'd just say that cheating only hurts the students doing it - as the homework grades would not influence the final grade. And sure enough, the students that never did their own work, rarely did well (if at all passed) on the finals exam.

It should be social and other soft pressure to do homework, only the final exam should be graded.

Cheating always has been available as an option. AI just makes it faster. At Cal, you always had students who would still pursue doing things on their own even when not cheating led to lower grades. The reality of it all is that cheating catches up to you eventually and the later it does, the worse are the outcomes. If you cruised through high school by cheating, you’ll not survive college. If you cruised through college by cheating you’ll not survive your first job. If you cruised through your first job by cheating you’re not getting a promotion or a second one.

Half the class was cheating in Ion Stoica’s OS class even when the whole thing was supposed to be a group effort. Like how are you cheating when you’re already working in groups of 4?

> If you cruised through high school by cheating, you’ll not survive college. If you cruised through college by cheating you’ll not survive your first job. If you cruised through your first job by cheating you’re not getting a promotion or a second one.

Love the optimism, but if you really believe the universe is this fair then you’re too young, too naive or too inexperienced (or any combination therein). The world is absolutely full of people who have cruised through all of that but still manage to get (and maintain) good high paying jobs all the time. “Failing upwards” is a commonly observed phenomenon everywhere, in pretty much every industry.

Truth is: none of that matters in the real world. What matters is how good you are at networking and bullshitting your way through life. Unfortunately for those of us that are terrible at bullshitting, this means a harder professional life no matter how much effort you put into it.

I think you’re conflating too many things here. Never claimed that the universe is fair nor do I claim that failing upwards isn’t a thing.

If you think bullshiting and networking are the only things that matter, then I believe it’s your pessimism that’s talking.

In a class of 100, if 50 decide to learn things and 50 decide to complete assignments using AI without learning, I’m willing to put money behind the idea that more people in the first group will do better in life. Of course there will be exceptions because there’s a lot more in life beyond competence, including luck that influences outcomes.

I know you chose 50/50 arbitrarily. But I think the real numbers are much worse. A few years ago, I stayed a couple nights at a hostel in a rural spot in Italy. I’m in my 50s, and most of the others there were Americans in their 20s, fairly recent grads. A dozen of us went out to dinner one night, and among the topics discussed was cheating in college. Only myself and one of the younger people said we did not cheat, the others all treated it as an expected part of the college experience. This isn’t exactly “data”, and perhaps there’s some sort of correlation between hostel-goer and cheater, but I was shocked at the numbers. And that was before LLM usage was common.

My read is it's pre- versus post-social media college experiences. There have always been a number of cheaters. But their blast radius of normalization was limited to their roommate or maybe even dorm floor. With social media, a single cheater at a single school can enable and normalize the practice for millions.

Have you been in a work place?

Being friends of the right people can totally give you all the promotions you need, even if all you do has negative value for the company.

The bigger issue here is that even if they don’t cheat and work hard to get all As, there may be no career for them at the end of it.

I use this in class. Basically if you turn in the complete work, your getting an A. But I make sure they know that there's an interviewer with slathering fangs waiting to make sure they have it down.

I'm not the students' competitor; the interviewer is. And the students not only have to impress the interviewer, but they have to impress them more than all their peers do!

The first place I taught gave no grades or unrequested feedback on anything. And no certificate. And those cohorts had the best placement rates. There was nothing in the school for the students to game, so they kept their eye on the real prize.

Even as technology has destroyed education as we know it, you and likely many others in education are still thinking about sticks?

The students have made it extremely clear to the teachers

Another angle on this is the tope that curriculum is so out of date your AI completed assignment may be ahead of the class subject matter. The real teacher is is having a motivation or need to do something and learning about what you need to learn to get the goal accomplished, AI can be a great companion for that journey, weeding out the sycophantic slop and getting to truth is the new challenge. There are a lot of elements to school that discourage curiosity (asking a stupid question in front of class) or being picked on for being a keener or other anti-intellectual "cool kid" mentalities. In the end we need to make the line between learning and success more obvious for young people, maybe that doesn't work when the definition of success includes fitting into a burocracy and letting the singing key be "4".

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